Unnatural links to your site has huge impacts on your website’s search engine ranking, which will be the result of manual action applied by Google.

How to find unnatural links?

If the links created to manipulate a website’s rankings in search engine results page, then they are considered as unnatural links.

These links are generated using various techniques which include; buying links, offer free products/service for links, links on low quality directories, links with keyword rich anchor texts, using automated tools to create links, using advertisements for backlinks, excessive guest blog posts, site wide backlinks, large scale backlinks from forums and many more.

In nutshell any links that are not created for visitors of website are unnatural links.

How to fix unnatural links?

Step 1: Download and find unnatural links pointed to the website using webmaster tool or any other backlink analysis tool.

Step 2: Try to remove these links using the best efforts by contacting the webmasters of the relevant websites. If you don’t want the link to be removed, it is ideal to add rel=”nofollow” attribute so that it shall not pass any link juice.

Step 3: Disavow any links that are unable to be removed, using disavow links option in Google’s webmaster tools.

Conclusion

Unnatural links may generate short term gains and rankings in search engine results page.

But sooner or later search engines will find it and the impact will be huge.

The impact on the business will be catastrophic if the website heavily relies on organic traffic from search engines.

It is advisable to comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines on linking to a site and linking from a site.

This will be the strategy for a long term and sustainable organic online traffic from search engines.